An exuberant account of love and great Italian food.
An American woman falls in love with an Italian man, his ebullient family, and a vibrant city.
In her warmhearted debut memoir, Wilson recounts arriving in Naples in 1996, just graduated from college, to embark on a three-month internship at the U.S. Consulate. Naples, “dirty and dangerous,” seemed to her tony friends and family an odd choice, but for the author, it amounted to a bit of rebellion. “I spent my childhood overachieving,” she writes. “It was time for a change.” Through the consul, who was a family friend, she met Raffaella Avallone, a glamorous 56-year-old who traveled in the best Neapolitan circles. Raffaella set her up on a date with her son, Salvatore, a handsome 23-year-old with an “adorable laugh,” and Wilson was smitten—not only with Salva, but also with his entire welcoming, embracing family and a culture that exalted the art of dining. Once a self-confessed binge eater, the author discovered a new relationship to food. “In Neapolitan culture,” she writes, “mealtimes are sacred—food is freshly prepared and consumed in campagnia. There is no rushing.” In the Avallones’ kitchen, Wilson watched as Raffaella prepared the delectable dishes that her family loved, such as eggplant parmigiana, ragu, and octopus salad, for which Wilson includes recipes. Enraptured with Naples, the author was surprised when Salva, visiting her in the U.S., became “enthralled by…a consumer culture that was much more advanced than that of Italy.” He quickly learned that phrases like “reward points, preferred customer, and supersaver” could lead to bargains. Wilson managed to live in Italy for several years, enrolling in a graduate program in international studies, teaching English, and pursuing her dream of acting—all while waiting for Salva to propose. But their big wedding in Washington, D.C., perplexed the Avallone family: there was no pasta.
An exuberant account of love and great Italian food.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9816-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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